Clean energy tax credit transfers fall in H1 2026, Crux expects up to US$49 billion in transfer value

This marks a challenging few quarters for the tax credit transfer space, which was further disrupted by the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) by the Trump administration last year, which included, among other provisions, a strict 4 July deadline for project developers to begin construction on clean energy projects to secure tax credits introduced by the IRA. In its mid-year report last year, Crux estimated that tax credit transfer value could be as high as US$60 billion by the end of the year, but in reality just US$42 billion of tax credits were transferred in 2025.

However, the analyst is optimistic in its forecasts for tax credit transfer value for the remainder of this year, estimating a total transfer value of US$47.5-49 billion for the full year 2026.

“Solar investment continues to be resilient,” explained Josh Price, director of market intelligence at Crux, who spoke exclusively to PV Tech. “While solar’s share of the tax credit transfer market declined to 30% from 35% year-over-year, this is a fairly modest pullback compared to wind, which saw its share fall much more sharply, from 23% to 7.5%, as it bore the brunt of both prohibited foreign entity (PFE) and permitting headwinds.”

Crux notes that 2024 saw a “seasonal trend” with more tax credits being transferred in the second half of the year than the first, however this cycle was “disrupted” in 2025 by the passage of the OBBBA; without a similar policy disruption expected for the second half of this year, Crux notes that “market activity suggests the market may be reverting to pre-OBBBA seasonality of deal volume”.

Solar, then storage, to lead capacity deployments

The Crux report notes that, despite the uncertainty created by the OBBBA, a number of renewable energy developers were able to take advantage of the 4 July ‘safe harbour’ rules, and reach a sufficient stage of development to secure the 45X production tax credit (PTC) and the 48E investment tax credit (ITC).

Over the past year, we saw developers move aggressively to safe-harbour projects ahead of the 4 July deadline, so there’s a substantial pipeline of over 170GW of solar and wind capacity positioned to move forward over the next several years,” explained Price.

Last week, PV Tech Premium spoke to Crux head of policy Hasan Nazar about the current US policy landscape for solar developers and investors, in particular, and he said that the current environment is one with “a lot of good news”, rather than one that is cause for significant concern.

This is also reflected in Crux’s forecasts for capacity additions in the coming years, with solar projects expected to account for the majority of new renewable energy deployments until 2028. Figures from Crux, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and S&P show that the US will add more than 100GW of new clean energy capacity each year between 2027 and 2029, with solar a key part of those additions.

However, the Crux figures show that, from 2029 onwards, storage will account for more capacity additions each year. This is where the OBBBA is likely to have an impact, as the 4 July construction start deadline was imposed for solar and wind projects, but other clean energy technologies were not subject to such a deadline.

As a result, a number of developers have sought to add battery energy storage systems (BESS) to their generation projects to make those projects eligible for the ITC; according to Crux, 32% of market participants cited a shift towards storage in their operations in order to access this tax credit.

This is in addition to a broader desire to deploy more storage across the US for energy security benefits—figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) show that the US added a record 9.7GWh of new BESS in the first quarter of this year—and these trends are reflected in Crux’s forecasts for clean energy investment by technology, which include batteries accounting for more investment than any other technology by the end of the decade. This would be a striking change considering that solar alone accounted for around three-quarters of investment as recently as 2023.

“We’re also seeing tremendous growth in solar-plus-storage investments, with transferable tax credits tied to these projects more than doubling their market share year over year,” explained Price. “Solar remains one of the fastest and lowest cost technologies to deploy, and it continues to draw investor appetite despite the phase-out of credits and PFE rules associated with new projects.”

Manufacturing investment rebounds, but doesn’t set record

Encouragingly, Crux has reported strong investment figures in US manufacturing in the first half of the year. The US’s clean energy capex reached US$74 billion in the first half of 2026, and Crux expects full-year capex to reach US$180 billion, which would be an increase over the US$155 billion reported in 2025. The Crux report also shows that quarterly investment in clean energy manufacturing increased between the first and second quarters of 2026, the first quarter-on-quarter increase in this area in six quarters.

In a trend that mirrors the decline in investment following the passage of the OBBBA, Crux notes that greenfield debt financing across power, manufacturing and clean fuels reached US$59 billion in the first half of 2026, up from the US$53 billion reported in the second half of 2025, but not at the level reported in the first half of 2025. However, the analyst expects this growth in investment to continue, expecting greenfield debt financing to exceed US$75 billion in the second half of this year, with power accounting for the vast majority of that investment.

Crux notes that this increase in investment “is driven primarily by solar supply chains”. Investment in solar manufacturing rose 30% between the first and second quarters of this year to US$893 million, while new manufacturing project announcements increased quarter-on-quarter, with such projects valued at US$10 billion, the highest value in announced projects reported since the first quarter of 2024.

According to Crux, solar projects accounted for 78% of all new manufacturing investment announcements in the second quarter of this year.

Manufacturing opportunities in the US solar sector will be a key topic of discussion at our annual PV CellTech USA conference in San Francisco on 13-14 October 2026. For the full agenda and details on booking, click here.